Long-Lost Panda Relative Revealed by 22,000-Year-Old Fossil

The weathered remains from a cave in China contain the world's oldest sample of panda DNA.
BY MAYA WEI-HAAS

PUBLISHED JUNE 18, 2018

In August 2014, paleoanthropologist Yingqi Zhang and his team descended into a sinkhole on the hunt for Gigantopithecus, the largest known primate to ever live. They came back out with a mix of bones from the hapless creatures that had fallen into the natural "death trap."

None of those bones belonged to the extinct ape, but the team was in for a surprise: The mix included a 22,000-year-old lower jaw from an ancient panda. And within its worn edges, the jaw held what is now the world's oldest sample of panda DNA.

With just a single fossil, it’s too soon to call the creature a new species. But the genetic evidence shows that the bone belongs to a previously unknown lineage of giant panda that split from its other panda cousins about 183,000 years ago.

This animal may have been specifically adapted to living in its subtropical home, suggesting that the black-and-white beasts were once much more diverse than they are today, the authors argue in a paper published today in the journal Current Biology.

More:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/oldest-panda-dna-fossil-jaw-china-paleontology-science/?beta=true